30.823, Review: Discourse Analysis; Language Acquisition; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Brezina, Flowerdew (2017)
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Subject: 30.823, Review: Discourse Analysis; Language Acquisition; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Brezina, Flowerdew (2017)
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Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2019 09:50:38
From: Jungmin Lim [limjung2 at msu.edu]
Subject: Learner Corpus Research
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-5110.html
EDITOR: Vaclav Brezina
EDITOR: Lynne Flowerdew
TITLE: Learner Corpus Research
SUBTITLE: New Perspectives and Applications
SERIES TITLE: Corpus and Discourse
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2017
REVIEWER: Jungmin Lim, Michigan State University
Corpus-based research in second language acquisition has contributed to the
understanding of language development especially from the perspective of the
usage-based approach; in many cases, corpus-based research has limited its
scope to the investigation of language development while the pedagogical
implication is not discussed and left to the readers’ own interpretation. This
edited volume “Learner Corpus Research: New Perspectives and Applications” by
Vaclav Brezina and Lynne Flowerdew is a timely and pedagogical contribution
because it provides dedicated sections for practitioners who have been eager
to see how learner corpus research can inform language teaching. This book
consists of eight chapters divided into two parts. In the first part, three
chapters discuss the roles of learner and task variables in a learner corpus.
In the second part, invited authors reported empirical studies covering a wide
range of topics in spoken and written learner corpora.
SUMMARY
Part 1. Task and Learner Variables
In Chapter 1, “The effect of task and topic on opportunity of use in learner
corpora”, Caines and Buttery open the discussion of the design issues of
learner corpora by reporting their analysis of the Cambridge Learner Corpus
as to to what extent topics affect lexical features, part-of-speech
frequencies and subcategorization frames. They sample 408 B2-level essays of
six topics (i.e., 68 essays * 6 topics) that represent distinct tasks (e.g.,
transactional, society, professional, narrative, autobiographical and
administrative). They report some differential distribution of lexical and
syntactic features across topics. For example, ‘society’ topic elicits more
nouns, whereas ‘transactional’ topic involves more verb occurrences.
‘Narrative’ and ‘autobiographical’ essays include more adverbs than other
prompts. On the syntactic level, they discuss that one group of topics
(autobiographical, narrative, and society) elicit a greater range of
subcategorization than the other group (administrative, professional, and
transactional). With these findings, Caines and Buttery suggest that teachers
utilize specific topics to induce learners to practice target forms. For
example, if students need to practice more prepositional arguments, a teacher
would deliberately choose a narrative prompt that the authors found most
relevant to the construction.
The second chapter “Phrasal verbs in spoken L2 English: the effect of L2
proficiency and L1 background” by Cervantes and Gablasova uses a subset of the
Trinity Lancaster Corpus that contains English learners’ responses to two
interactive speaking tasks. As the title says, they look into how learners of
English at three proficiency levels (B1, B2, and C1 and C2) and four
linguistic backgrounds (Spanish, Chinese, Italian, and Russian) differently
produce phrasal verbs (i.e., the verb and an adverbial particle). They present
that the effects of proficiency and language background are statistically
significant with small effect sizes. In addition, they describe that learners
tend to use a few types of phrasal verbs repeatedly, which indicate the needs
to build knowledge of different types of phrasal verbs. With their findings,
Cervantes and Gablasova recommdendthat teachers introduce more academic and
subject-specific phrasal verbs as students’ proficiency develops. They also
point out that the depth of phraseological knowledge needs to be developed
because often times learners deploy only a limited range of meaning of
polysemous phrasal verbs.
Chapter 3, entitled “Investigating the effect of the study abroad variable on
learner output: A pseudo-longitudinal study on spoken German learner English”
by Götz and Mukherjee is a cross-sectional study that investigates how
study-abroad experience influenced fluency, accuracy and vocabulary
development. They use an error-tagged LINSEI-German corpus and used the
metadata about the speakers’ study-abroad experience to formulate an
independent variable at three levels (none, 1-12 months, and over 13 months).
For the dependent variables they compute fluency measures that represent
temporal fluency (e.g., unfilled pauses, mean length of run, and speech rate)
and strategies relevant to fluency (e.g., frequency of discourse markers and
small words). In terms of accuracy, they count verb-tense errors and article
errors using the error-tagged corpus. Lastly, they use the error-tagged corpus
to examine lexical competency (e.g., number of words per interview and lexical
error frequency). Using a series of general linear models, they reveal that
students with longer study-abroad experience produce more fluent speech;
however, findings for accuracy and vocabulary are inconclusive. They interpret
the findings as the benefits of study-abroad may not be captured in linguistic
measures. This chapter, however, does not explicitly discuss teaching
implications.
This first part of the volume considers the effects of task and learner
variables. While Chapter 1 controls learner variables and focuses on exploring
the task variables, other chapters shed light on the learner factors by either
setting those as an independent variable (Chapter 2) or focusing on a
particular learner group (Chapter 3). Chapters 2 and 3 control task variables
in order to achieve their research goals on learner variables. Thus these
chapters, using different dataset and exploring different task and learner
variables, are great examples for researchers who are interested in how such
variables play roles in learner language.
Part 2. Analysis of Learner Language
Chapter 4 “Disagreement in L2 spoken English: From learner corpus research to
corpus-based teaching materials” by Gablasova and Brezina reports a study that
uses the subcorpus of TLC that is used in Chapter 2. Problematizing the lack
of research in lack of research in socio-pragmatic skills, especially
dispreferred speech acts, they investigate agreement-plus-disagreement
construction (e.g, yes but, see your point but, true but and okay but). This
cross-sectional study describes the frequency of disagreement act and
strategies to achieve this speech act in different proficiency levels. The
researchers report that advanced learners produce more disagreement
constructions than the intermediate and low-intermediate groups. In addition,
advanced learners utilize various strategies to communicate disagreement while
lower-intermediate learners show more limited range in strategy use. Based on
the findings that the quantity and range of disagreement construction changes
as proficiency develops, Gablasova and Brezina provid two corpus-driven
activities that can be used to learn how to broaden linguistic repertoires to
express disagreement. These exemplary activities inspire the readers to apply
similar approaches to teach other linguistic resources for particular speech
acts.
Molenda, Pęzik and Osborne, the authors of Chapter 5 “Self-repetitions in
learners’ spoken language: A corpus-based study” report a study that focuses
on repetition in spoken data. They operationalize that repeating in
interaction is to earn some time during interaction (i.e., repeat), and to
reinforce some information (I.e., repetition). Focusing on the self-repetition
which can include both repeat and repetition, they compare native and
nonnative speakers’ use of repetition and how proficiency play a role in the
use of repetition. They analyze a spoken component of PELCRA Learner English
Corpus, a corpus dataset of spoken output by Polish learners of English whose
proficiency ranged from low intermediate to high (CEFR A2 to C2 levels), in
comparison with British National Corpus. They report a clear overuse of
repetition in the nonnative corpus. In term of the role of proficiency in
repetition use, advanced learners of English use dramatically more repetition
than the lower level learners. Their pedagogical suggestion include that
teachers can focus on reducing repetitions within lexical bundles.
Chapter 6 “Corpus-driven study of information systems project reports” by
Miller and Pessoa shifts focus from structures to functions. This study
investigates the functional categories in native and nonnative speakers’
project reports compared to a reference corpus. For the study, they build
small corpus that included the authentic project reports by 12 native speakers
and 35 advanced nonnative speakers' project reports; and use Freiburg-Brown
corpus as a reference corpus. Nonnative speaker data are also divided into two
groups according to their grade levels (17 junior and 18 senior students).
They find that project reports display different distribution of rhetorical
functions from the reference corpus, indicating genre-specific language.
Nonnative speakers' reports showed similar patterns to the native speakers'
reports in terms of rhetorical functions, except that senior students used
significantly fewer reporting functions than native speakers' reports. With
the findings that nonnative speakers are able to follow the genre conventions,
Miller and Pessoa reiterate the importance of using model texts when providing
assignments.
Chen’s study, Chapter 7 “Beyond frequencies: Investigating the semantic and
stylistic features of phrasal verbs in a three-year longitudinal study corpus
by Chinese university students”, looks into the phrasal verbs, which Cervantes
and Gablasova discussed in Chapter 2, from a different angle. Chen builds a
longitudinal corpus that consist of six essays composed by 130 Chinese
learners of English over three years. While there is no linear increasement of
the amount of phrasal verb use over three years, learners produce new phrasal
verbs that they have not used in the previous years. In addition, learners
become more sensitive in selecting phrasal verbs appropriate for registers.
When it comes to the phrasal verbs with multiple meanings, Chen found positive
change from year 1 to 3 while there is a drop on the second year. The chapter
provides teaching implications including the needs of focusing on
register-dependent phrasal verbs and the potentials of using corpus-driven
activities that make learners to conduct simple and guided search for phrasal
verbs.
The last chapter “Figurative language in intermediate-level second language
writing” by Paris compares metaphors in written texts of two proficiency
levels. Manually reading and coding the metaphors on a small corpus of written
texts by 52 low-intermediate and intermediate French learners of English,
Paris identifies five categories that explain learners’ use of metaphors:
overextension, L1 transfer, personification, idiomatic expression, and
creative metaphors. Results include that in low-intermediate students’ essays,
the first rank of the figurative language is the outcome of L1 transfer (45%)
and one-third was acceptable figurative language (e.g., cases of idiomatic
expression and creative metaphors). In the intermediate students’ essays,
idiomatic expressions rank the highest (44%) followed by L1 transfer (39%).
The author emphasize the explicit instruction on the cross-linguistic
influences, which could be applicable when students share their first
language.
The second part of the edited volume provide empirical studies that examine a
wide range of linguistic aspects of learner language. Interestingly, these
corpus studies reveal that learners’ language development may not show a
linear progression. For example, findings from Chapters 5 and 7 show dynamic
development, including progression and regression, over time.
EVALUATION
As the title says, this edited volume offers fresh perspectives and
applications about learner corpus research to readers. In terms of the new
perspectives, I would highlight the books’ range and reporting practice.
Brezina and Flowerdew, the editors, balance the chapters in a way that readers
can explore the full range of L2 corpus research. For example, four chapters
discussed spoken language (Chapters 2-5) while the other four reported studies
on written language (Chapters 1, 6-8). Some studies use large corpus (e.g.,
Cambridge Learner Corpus in Chapter 1, Trinity Lancaster Corpus in Chapters 2
and 4) and the others collected learner language to investigate their research
questions (Chapters 6-8).
Another significance of this volume is its excellent reporting practice. All
contributors give detailed description for the methods sections, which allow
readers to replicate research as the field of applied linguistics and second
language acquisition advocate (e.g., Norris, Plonsky, Ross, & Schoonen, 2015).
For example, studies consistently report effect sizes when using inferential
statistics. Given that inferential statistics with large sample size can
detect even small effects statistically significant, having effect sizes in
the findings can help readers interpret findings accurately. It is also
noteworthy that results sections present graphs that clearly visualize and
summarize findings.
On top of the great quality, the most valuable contribution of this volume,
from a teacher’s perspective, is the designated pedagogical implication
section for each chapter. While some corpus-based research would not aim to
provide teaching implication, readers whose primary interest is on how to
apply research findings to improve instruction would appreciate the authors’
explicit statement about what practitioners can benefit from research studies.
The most explicit pedagogical implication, amongst many great suggestions
throughout the volume, can be found from Chapter 4 where authors provided
sample corpus-based activities ready for teaching some English pragmatics.
In spite of its extensive coverage high quality, this book has a few areas
that could have made this volume even more accessible. First, it would have
been even more informative if some chapters had discussed relevant studies in
instructed second language acquisition. For example, Part 1 of this volume
could have been connected to some recent works in second language writing that
found the effects of genre on the linguistic features covering complexity,
accuracy and fluency (e.g., Yang, Lu, & Weigle, 2015; Yoon & Polio, 2017) and
cognitive task-based research that investigated the effects of manipulating
cognitive task complexity within a genre on spoken and written language (e.g.,
Kormos, 2011; Révész, Kourtali, & Mazgutova, 2017). In addition, findings from
chapter 3 could have been discussed in line with some recent works that
reported different patterns that pseudolongitudinal and longitudinal analyses
provided when identical data was analyzed to explain the developmental pattern
of phraseological competence, including phrasal verb knowledge (e.g., Bestgen
& Granger, 2014). As such, there were some places that recent research in SLA
could be discussed to provided more synthesized view. Another suggestion could
be to provide a comprehensive overview of the book that explains how different
studies connect to each other. While these suggestions could improve the
accessibility of this volume, it should be noted that adding more content
would affect the brevity of the current version achieved.
This volume is an invaluable resource to a wide range of readers, including
applied linguists and teachers, who are interested in the learner language and
corpus-based research. Researchers can use this book to find exemplary studies
with great reporting practices. Especially appreciating readers would be
practitioners who have been longing for empirical evidence as to whether their
instinct about learner language can be empirically studied, and if so what
they could do with those interlanguage patterns.
REFERENCES
Bestgen, Y., & Granger, S. (2014). Quantifying the development of
phraseological competence in L2 English writing: An automated approach.
Journal of Second Language Writing, 26, 28–41.
Kormos, J. (2011). Task complexity and linguistic and discourse features of
narrative writing performance. Journal of Second Language Writing, 20(2),
148–161.
Norris, J. M., Plonsky, L., Ross, S. J., & Schoonen, R. (2015). Guidelines for
reporting quantitative methods and results in primary research. Language
Learning, 65, 470-476.
Révész, A., Kourtali, N. E., & Mazgutova, D. (2017). Effects of Task
Complexity on L2 Writing Behaviors and Linguistic Complexity. Language
Learning, 67(1), 208–241.
Yang, W., Lu, X., & Weigle, S. C. (2015). Different topics, different
discourse: Relationships among writing topic, measures of syntactic
complexity, and judgments of writing quality. Journal of Second Language
Writing, 28, 53–67.
Yoon, H.-J., & Polio, C. (2017). The linguistic development of students of
English as a second language in two written genres. TESOL Quarterly, 51(2),
275–301.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Jungmin Lim is a PhD candidate in Second Language Studies program at Michigan
State University. Her research interests are in the areas of second language
writing, language assessment, and computer-assisted language learning.
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